There’s not a single woman in the House of Representatives but
that will change if female policy shapers who are meeting in Belize have their
way. Over the next three days women from across the Caribbean will be meeting
in Belize to exchange ideas and discuss what can be done to have women not only
become more active in politics but to train and prepare women for elections.
According to the United Nations Fund for Women in the Caribbean, women’s
participation and representation at all levels continues to be low, twenty years
after the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women.
So what has been the problem? It is believed that cultural and traditional
practices are responsible. And now, this three day meeting is expected to provide
the forum for continued dialogue on how best to advance the participation of
women in leadership positions in the Caribbean. 7NEWS spoke with one of the
active members. Hazel Brown, the representative from Trinidad and Tobago and
the first ever Caribbean Institute of Women in leadership, CIWIL.
Hazel Brown, CIWIL
“Women have always been involved in politics but what they haven’t
been involved with is the leadership. We’ve done the work but we supported
men and it was men who got elected. The numbers were very low and we thought
it was time for us to be a part of a worldwide movement for the greater participation
of women in the political decision making, in the Parliaments, in the local
governments. And we set about since then to figure what strategies we should
use, how we could support each other to make it happen and we’ve made
it happen in some places. The first example was in Antigua where the first woman
was elected in 2004. In Trinidad and Tobago we just elected 11 women out of
41 for the Parliament, we’ve increased the number of women in local government
from 25 to 65 something, from 15% to close to 40% now.
We are alike in a lot of ways and in a lot of ways we are very different.
A very striking example that came to me is that right in this region we’ve
going where they’ve been elections, we went to Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad,
St. Lucia. When we were invited to come to Barbados to work with women we were
told that in Barbados women in cross parties don’t come together in public
meetings and in Trinidad and Tobago it doesn’t matter what party you are
from and here it is in the one little pocket that interaction, they said it
couldn’t be done. So there are challenges are in different places but
like I said, we can learn from each other about how you do it.
We’ve been concerned about more than just the numbers. We are concerned
about our efforts to create a critical mass of gender sensitive women so that
women’s issues could become a part of the political agenda, could be part,
for example, of the allocation of resources at the national budget level, and
that all voices can be heard in the places where it matters on issues like domestic
violence, about child maintenance, about social and health services for women,
about reproductive health rights – all of those issues that are not now
on the table that we could put those things on the table.”
The participants represent nearly all of the Commonwealth Caribbean
Countries.
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